Posts Tagged «22nm»

Intel will combine its PC and mobile chip divisions, according to an email sent to employees by CEO Brian Krzanich. There’s no word on how this might affect Intel’s future PC and mobile products, but presumably this might be the end of either the Atom or Core line of chips — which, to be honest, is probably a sensible move given how the latest Atom and ultra-mobile Core chips are fairly close in terms of performance and power consumption.

I don’t think you appreciate just how magical the computer chip at the heart of your smartphone or PC really is. In the case of a smartphone’s SoC, you essentially have a single less-than-a-square-inch package that enables you to do almost anything, from playing games, to accessing a cellular network, to contactlessly paying for your groceries. Let’s zoom in on a CPU to see just how it performs all of those functions.

At its Analyst Day last week, Intel finally gave notice that it would be scrapping the 32-bit limit and launching a 64-bit platform for the new 22nm chip. According to Intel, 64-bit support will arrive for Windows first, followed by Android tablets. This is likely (at least partly) a response to strong uptake for the new Apple processors.

Imec, perhaps the world’s top semiconductor research center, has created the first monolithic III-V CMOS transistors on 300mm silicon wafers. With current silicon-based transistors hitting a wall at around 14nm, this accomplishment is probably the biggest step towards CMOS scaling down to 7nm and below.

Ahead of its 2014 launch, Intel has started open-sourcing the Linux driver for Broadwell’s GPU. Broadwell is the 14nm die shrink of Intel’s Haswell microarchitecture, and while the CPU side of things isn’t expected to change much, Broadwell’s GPU looks like it will be a broad (!) and significant reworking of the Intel HD 5000-series (Iris) GPU found in Haswell.

The first benchmarks of Intel’s upcoming Bay Trail SoC have appeared online — and it’s good news for x86 fans, but terrible news for ARM: Bay Trail-T, clocked at just 1.1GHz, is around 30% faster than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 clocked at 2.3GHz, the fastest ARM chip on the market.

Intel’s Haswell is a bit of a puzzle. On the one hand, this is the fastest single-threaded chip in the world — but on the other, it’s hard to get excited about a chip that’s only a few percent faster, consumes more power, and has weaker overclocking potential than its predecessor. Where did it all go wrong for the master chip maker?

At Computex 2013 in Taiwan, Intel has finally gone into detail on its upcoming mobile parts — Haswell, Merrifield, Bay Trail — and the other exciting technologies that make up each platform. Intel showed off a fanless tablet, based on its new ultra-low-power 6W Haswell parts, showed off tablets and ultrabooks with the the new integrated Iris (HD 5000) graphics, and confirmed that, with Bay Trail, it’s marching into the Android tablet market.

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